Thank you so much for having me and for your warm welcome this morning. It's very early in the morning here in Australia.
You were saying, particularly about the IRGC.... I guess I am a victim of the IRGC myself through my own experiences, but I also witnessed the gross violations of human rights toward Iranian prisoners, toward their own prisoners.
I can speak a little bit about my own experience and also more broadly about their attitudes and behaviours toward political prisoners and more generally within the system itself, building on what the previous speaker, Aarabi, said regarding the fact that there's been this process of state capture and that, often, the Revolutionary Guards really seem to be running the show in areas where the judiciary or the so-called elected wing of the government used to dominate.
I was essentially a diplomatic hostage of the Revolutionary Guards for two years and three months. I was arrested in September 2018 at Tehran Airport. I'm an Australian-British national. I have no link to Iran whatsoever, and I'd travelled to Iran for a brief three-week period to attend an academic conference in my capacity as lecturer on Islamic studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
I was arrested at the airport, whilst attempting to depart the country, by the Revolutionary Guards, who accused me eventually of being a spy. I was convicted one year later in a sham trial in a revolutionary court, which obviously is a parallel court system of the Revolutionary Guards within the judiciary. I was given a 10-year sentence. There was absolutely no evidence whatsoever—not even any presented in the closed-door, secretive court.
From the early days of my arrest I was viewed as a bargaining chip by the Revolutionary Guards—essentially a hostage, as somebody who they could exchange for some sort of concessional benefit from one of my countries, because they knew that I was both British and Australian. The Australian government took the lead in negotiating my release and—again, building on what the previous speaker said about the Revolutionary Guards taking over the state or acting as a deep state—the Australian government had to negotiate with the IRGC directly to secure my release, and not with the Iranian foreign ministry or the official law or recognized wing of the Iranian government.
Obviously, they tried talking to the latter at the very beginning, but diplomatically it became clear that they had no power over my case and that they had to go directly to the source, to the hostage-takers themselves, and find out what they wanted. What they wanted was the release of three of their citizens, three IRGC members and IRGC operatives. They wanted their own guys—and not just any old Iranian citizens—from a Thai prison, who had been convicted of attempting to blow up the Israeli ambassador's car in Bangkok about a decade prior.
When I was in prison, I personally was subjected to numerous human rights violations, particularly psychological torture methods and prolonged periods of time in extreme solitary confinement. I spent 12 months cumulatively in solitary confinement. All sorts of human rights of mine were abused. But that was actually the norm, and I saw treatment much worse meted out to Iranian nationals.
Some of the co-defendants of the Canadian citizen, Kavous Seyed-Emami, were my cellmates, and I learned a lot about his fate. Obviously he passed away in Evin Prison in 2018, a Canadian professor, and the circumstances surrounding his death have never been really explained by the Iranian regime. He died in IRGC custody. We were told by IRGC members in the facility, Du Alef, where we were kept at the time, that he actually had a heart attack under interrogation and that it was covered up and made to look like a suicide.